ShipMonk’s ecommerce scaling solutions raise $290mn

Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based ShipMonk offers fulfilment and inventory management solutions for ecommerce firms.

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic supercharging the trend towards ecommerce by restricting access to physical stores, the pressure is on ecommerce retailers to scale their solutions to meet demand, with figures quoted by ShipMonk suggesting Black Friday sales were up 22% compared to last year.

The company operates an ecommerce management platform that sorts backend logistics, and synchronises with marketplace platforms such as Shopify via APIs. ShipMonk’s warehouse locations are spread across the US, and automated to save costs and improve delivery speeds.

Back in 2018, the company raised $10mn via a Series A round led by SJF Ventures, alongside Supply Chain Ventures and Grotech Ventures. Its latest private equity round, announced yesterday, was led by Summit Partners, raising $290mn.

In a press release, ShipMonk Founder and CEO, Jan Bednar said: “ShipMonk was founded to alleviate the burden of supply chain management and allow brand owners to focus on the magic of their front-end customer experience.

“Small and medium-sized brands are working at an incredible pace to keep up with both increased demand and consumers’ service-level expectations. Fulfillment and inventory management technology has quickly become a critical component to ensure seamless delivery. Our solutions can quite literally make the difference between an item arriving on time or behind schedule, and ultimately, the difference between building brand loyalty or losing a valuable customer.”

The company said it would use the funds to accelerate its growth and invest in R&D, hiring and international expansion.

“We believe ShipMonk truly demonstrates the power of a bootstrapped, durable growth mindset. Jan identified a significant gap in the market and, together with the ShipMonk team, has scaled the business in a deliberate and capital efficient manner to address that need. The results have been impressive,” said Christopher Dean, a Managing Director at Summit Partners.